Does light microscopy have a future?

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SUMMARY: The application of light microscopy in medicine and cell biology has been significantly influenced by both the availability of specific biological reagents such as monoclonal antibodies and nucleic acid probes, as well as by the enormous progress in microelectronics and computer technology. It is likely that specific reagents for a variety of cellular macromolecules will become available on a large scale in the coming years. Moreover, methods using both sensitive detection devices such as charge‐coupled device (CCD) cameras and sophisticated image processing exist to quantify this information at the single molecule level in morphologically intact cells.This paper describes the impact of these two factors on the light microscope of the future, with special emphasis on fluorescence. It defines the improvements that still are required to solve some of the challenging problems such as the quantification of unique genes and their products in intact cells, the quantification of DNA adducts and the detection of rare mutant cells or circulating tumour cells.

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